When Ruperto Vicens-Marquez didn’t show up for his normal 6:30 a.m. shift on Friday, Oct. 17, Emilio Vicens-Marquez, his brother and business partner, began to spiral.
Emilio repeatedly called Ruperto, but he couldn’t get through. So, he called his sister-in-law, who told him that Ruperto had left their home hours ago.
“That’s when I knew that something was not right,” Emilio told HuffPost in a phone call.
Hours later, Emilio received a call from his brother, who had apparently been detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in front of St. Agnes Catholic Church, just a block away from Emilio’s Kitchen, the restaurant the brothers co-own in a small community along the Jersey Shore called Atlantic Highlands.
The arrest didn’t make any sense. Ruperto had been living and working legally in the U.S. for nearly two decades.
Moreover, the brothers and their self-described “Puebla-inspired” restaurant are considered beloved pillars of the community. Emilio’s Kitchen serves organic Mexican cuisine at two locations in New Jersey. The original location in Atlantic Highlands has nearly 700 raving reviews on Google with a 4.9-star average rating. Many of the reviewers wrote fondly of the restaurant’s friendly and inviting service alongside excellent food.
Ruperto, who is the head chef at the restaurant, moved to the U.S. from Mexico in 2007, according to court documents obtained by HuffPost. He renewed his visa last year and was legally authorized to live in the U.S. until at least 2029.
“They were looking for somebody else. It wasn’t me at all. I was just there,” Ruperto told HuffPost.
ICE didn’t immediately return HuffPost’s request for comment. But in a statement given to PIX 11 News, the agency described Ruperto as “a Mexican national who previously entered the United States illegally and was issued a final order of removal by an immigration judge on July 18, 2025.” They also said Ruperto had a prior arrest “for resisting arrest and local ordinance violations.”
Ruperto’s attorney, Steven Lyons, disputed ICE’s characterization of his immigration status.
“Ruperto is not subject to, nor was ever issued, a final order of removal,” Lyons told HuffPost, noting he was issued a work authorization by USCIS valid for five years. “His prior arrest resulted in payment of a fine pursuant to the local ordinance of disturbing the peace. The charge of resisting arrest was dismissed.”
Lyons also noted that the judge “confirmed no order of removal and found he was not a flight risk nor a danger to the community.”
There were two other men in the car with Ruperto, heading to work at Emilio’s Kitchen. The two of them were also detained. Emilio said that one of them was deported to Mexico within days. The other was transferred to an ICE facility in a different state. Ruperto narrowly avoided a similar fate — he remained at Delaney Hall, an immigration detention center in Newark, New Jersey, for over a month, after Judge Katharine S. Hayden signed an order on Oct. 30 that prevented his transfer or deportation at the request of Attorney Steven Lyons.
Despite having the proper authorization to live in the U.S., ICE maintained that Ruperto was not eligible for bond. But, after Lyons filed a petition for habeas corpus, calling for Ruperto’s release or a bond hearing, Judge Hayden issued an order for a bond hearing to be held within seven days of Nov. 6.
Call it luck, or fate, or serendipity, but that order was the first in a series of fortunate turns for Ruperto in the minutes, hours and days following his arrest that kept him close to home and spared from some of the conditions many others have faced in detention. Most importantly, he had at least temporarily avoided entering the Trump administration’s aggressive and deliberately opaque deportation process, in which detainees — many of them here legally — are either deported immediately or transferred between facilities repeatedly, making it nearly impossible for their families and lawyers to find them. The Trump administration has forced thousands of families into that very maze amid the president’s forceful campaign to track down and deport as many immigrants as possible.
But Ruperto had the judge’s order. And he had his entire community working to secure his release.
Residents from Ruperto’s small New Jersey town banded together on multiple fronts to call for his release. His situation caught the attention of Atlantic Highlands Mayor Lori Hohenleitner, who created and promoted a successful GoFundMe campaign to help Ruperto obtain legal assistance.
At the time of writing, about 1,300 people donated more than $96,000 to the online fundraiser, which had a goal of $100,000.
Kerri Kennedy, international associate general secretary at American Friends Service Committee, estimates that about 100 people showed up at two demonstrations to call on ICE to release him. Community members also submitted at least 45 letters of support for Ruperto to the court.
(The letters are sealed, but Hayden wrote in a court order that the “overwhelming message from the letters was the extent and length of Petitioner’s ties to his community.”)
The judge granted Ruperto’s release on Nov. 13, giving the government 24 hours to appeal the decision. While the government didn’t appeal, the faulty electronic payment system ultimately delayed his official release until Nov. 18, when Hohenleitner and Kennedy drove to Newark to pay his bond in person.
After a wrongful detention, 33 days behind bars, a judge’s fateful intervention and a community-wide campaign to secure his release, Ruperto was free.
“And this is when you have $100,000 in a GoFundMe ready for legal fees. You have the whole town behind you. You have a mayor, you have somebody who’s an executive in this field,” Kennedy told HuffPost the day after his release. “That’s what it took, and he was still in for another extra five days.”
As part of his release, Kennedy also said that he is temporarily required to wear an ankle monitor: “He still has this burden of being entrenched in the legal system, even though he has his authorization and was released.”
“I think the outpouring of local support for Ruperto has been phenomenal in this case, and certainly kept his spirits high enough to be able to get through this experience,” Lyons said during a phone call.
Two days after he was released, Ruperto said in an interview with HuffPost that he was “worried” about the attention the city gave him at first, but he grew to accept and embrace it.
“When a lot of people get together, at least in my case, things are possible. Miracles happen.”
And, for Ruperto at least, the miracles continued. The Atlantic Highlands community welcomed him home on Saturday in a stunning display with an inspiring and heartfelt rally. It concluded with Emilio’s Kitchen welcoming and feeding the community members.
“I’m grateful for all these people that give the time to do this for someone like me,” Ruperto said. He added that when other people still detained at Delaney Hall would see people leaving, “that would give some hope they have a chance. It’s worth it sometimes to keep fighting.”
Emilio’s Kitchen: The ‘Lifeblood’ Of The Town
Atlantic Highlands has a population of less than 5,000. Kerri Kennedy described it as a “lovely, little idyllic shoreside community.”
“It is a politically diverse town where people do look out for each other, even though there are strong divisions of political opinion,” Kennedy told HuffPost.
Ruperto’s detainment turned Atlantic Highlands upside down.
After hearing about the news of his detainment from former Council President Steve Boracchia, Hohenleitner called attention to the situation online, saying that immigration agents inconspicuously conducted their operations without informing local officials. If a neighbor had witnessed the immigration agents “snatching” up the three individuals in the car, the situation could’ve been much worse, the mayor told HuffPost.
“So if my police had no idea what was going on, how were they going to respond to that situation? It just puts every community at risk [when] ICE is coming into a small community like ours at 6:30 in the morning, and in front of our church, snatching people out of vehicles,” she said.
Hohenleitner said she used to dine at all the restaurants where the brothers had previously worked and got a bit choked up as she talked about the brothers starting Emilio’s Kitchen, which she called “their version of the American Dream.”
“I can’t tell you how much love goes into the food that they cook,” the mayor, who is now a regular at Emilio’s Kitchen, added.
Emilio’s Kitchen was the “lifeblood” of the town, a place where everyone was welcomed despite ideological differences, Hohenleitner said. That isn’t the case everywhere in the town, as there are “some places that seem to be more one side or the other,” the mayor said.
There were two demonstrations in honor of Ruperto during his monthlong detainment at the immigration detention center Delaney Hall: one at Veterans Park and another in front of Delaney.
“The whole community came out. You had Republicans, you had Democrats, you had people who weren’t political. You had older people, younger people. So it was really, really heartwarming,” Kennedy said, adding the Atlantic Highlands doesn’t see many political rallies.
“This is just an indication that Americans don’t want a democracy where rights are being ignored and people can ‘be disappeared,’ and they want people to be treated with dignity and with their human rights honored and protected,” Kennedy added.
Emilio told HuffPost after the first demonstration that people kept telling him, “Keep yourself strong. We’re gonna get there. We’re gonna get your brother.”
“I’m not afraid of anything. I just want my brother back,” Emilio said at the time.
Along with Emilio, Ruperto was forced to leave behind his wife, Cristy Orantes Rosales, and their three young children — Bela, 7; Daniel, 5; and Elizabeth, 4 — when he was detained.
While Ruperto was gone, Emilio was given the impossible task of filling the hole that ICE left.
Emilio tried to step in for Ruperto where he could, including eating dinner with his kids and walking them to the bus stop, but he was spread thin. Emilio said that business picked up even more at the restaurant as community members tried to support the family.
“I gotta be watching his kids, and I got my kids, and I got two restaurants open, and I’m short with hands, and I don’t know what’s gonna happen,” Emilio told HuffPost in a phone call before his brother’s release. “And I don’t feel like I have enough time to spend for two restaurants and family.”
Emilio said he spoke with his brother once or twice a day for about a minute at a time. Emilio described Ruperto’s mental state as peaceful because he did nothing wrong.
“I hear his voice. I know he’s peaceful. It doesn’t mean that he’s happy being there without his family, right? But he’s not suffering, torturing himself about remorse, saying, ‘I shouldn’t do this, why did I do that?’”
Given the uncertainty and helplessness of the situation, Ruperto’s family was preparing for the worst, according to Emilio. If ICE had deported Ruperto, the entire family would have followed, he claimed.
“If [immigration] doesn’t let him stay here, he’s going to start a new life wherever he goes. And my sister-in-law is also getting prepared to go with him wherever he goes. And I know that if they do that, I guess we got to do the same. Family is very important for us,” he added.
Ruperto told HuffPost that his brother was a “hero” for keeping their restaurants and families afloat while he was away. “I don’t know how he did it, actually.”
Inside Delaney Hall
The Newark-based immigration detention center that held Ruperto reopened on May 1, 2025, after private prison company GEO Group signed a 15-year, $1 billion contract with ICE.
According to the New Jersey Monitor, Delaney Hall is the first immigration center opened under Trump’s second administration and it is the largest on the East Coast. (Delaney Hall operated as an immigration detention center from 2011 to 2017.)
While the Atlantic Highlands community was showing up for Ruperto outside of Delaney Hall, there was another community building inside the walls of the detention center.
All they had was each other, Ruperto said. That sense of community was necessary to keep them safe and in good — or at least decent — spirits while navigating less than ideal conditions inside Delaney Hall.
Ruperto told HuffPost the quality of the food was often questionable, and the facility would sometimes have broken pipes that would cause water to accumulate on the bathroom floors.
He also said detainees had no concept of what could happen to them or anyone around them at any given moment. They could be transferred to another facility or deported with little to no notice.
“You try to do the best you can do with whatever you have,” he said, adding that each of the people detained worked to “support each other.”
Although the detention center has only recently resumed operations, it has already come under fire for its subpar conditions.
“The conditions at the Delaney Hall ICE detention facility in Newark are untenable. With serious security lapses, numerous reports of mistreatment by staff of detainees, complaints of persistent food shortages, and a troubling lack of transparency from facility administrators, it’s clear that GEO Group has shown it cannot—or will not—operate Delaney Hall humanely or safely,” New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker (D) said in a June statement.
The facility has also been the site of much strife since its reopening.
Newark Mayor Ras Baraka (D) was arrested at the facility on May 9 as he and members of the state legislature attempted to tour the facility. While his trespassing charge was dropped 10 days later, U.S. Rep. LaMonica McIver was indicted on three counts of “assaulting, resisting, impeding and interfering” with federal officers and is facing a maximum of 17 years in prison if convicted.
The following month, four detainees escaped the facility on June 12 after breaking through an aluminum wall on the second floor, according to the United States Attorney’s Office in the District of New Jersey. Their escapes from the facility came during an explosive moment of unrest that had been brewing for days, according to The New York Times.
New Jersey Urban News reported that some detainees disclosed not having been fed for almost a full day, and those who were fed were only given hot dogs or bread. DHS denied the reporting in a statement.
All four escapees have since been found, including one detainee who spent about a month outside of the facility. They were charged with escape from the custody of an institution or officer, and face a maximum of one year in jail and a $100,000 fine, according to the U.S. attorney’s office in New Jersey’s press release.
The city of Newark is also suing the privately-operated facility, claiming that it does not have the proper permits to operate. GEO Group, which has tried to get the lawsuit dismissed, has claimed it’s politically motivated and that it “represents the latest in a series of efforts by New Jersey officials to cripple federal immigration enforcement in the state,” the New Jersey Monitor reported, citing court documents.
A GEO Group spokesperson provided HuffPost with a boilerplate statement that doesn’t address allegations of inhumane conditions at Delaney Hall or Ruperto’s detainment.
HuffPost also reached out to ICE for comment but did not hear back. Gov. Phil Murphy declined HuffPost’s request for comment.
‘Trump’s Dark America’
Ruperto’s arrest comes as the Department of Homeland Security and ICE execute President Donald Trump’s racist and xenophobic mass deportation agenda.
As part of this effort, the Trump administration has sought to hire thousands more ICE agents as they work to meet their goal of detaining 3,000 people per day (or roughly 90,000 per month). The reckless hiring spree has been expedited by reducing the amount of required training, but, unsurprisingly, it has put a strain on the human resources department. It also resulted in errors. ICE dismissed 200 recruits in late October who didn’t pass the drug test, failed to meet requirements or had criminal convictions on their record.
Trump has said he will detain and deport “dangerous criminals” and “the worst of the worst.” The Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) reported in September that 71.5% of detainees don’t have any criminal convictions.
The Department of Homeland Security said in October that more than 500,000 undocumented immigrants have been deported since Trump reassumed office. DHS has not provided evidence that backs up that number. However, NPR estimated that the number could actually be much lower, around 300,000 on the high end.
The deportations and detentions have an undeniable impact on families. But immigration experts say that Trump’s agenda will also hurt the economy, the health care system and society at large.
“Trump’s dark America is not going to penetrate Atlantic Highlands,” Hohenleitner told HuffPost. “We’re going to fight back, and we are going to protect our own, and we are going to protect others from other communities, because now we know how to do it. We didn’t need to have these tools before, but now we obviously do.”
“The most important thing about this is that there is nobody except the indigenous peoples of this country who are not immigrants to this country,” she added. “If America is to continue to be the beacon of democracy in this world, then we need to get back to having the commitment to rights and living the American dream.”
Despite the undue hardship placed on him and his family, Emilio spoke highly about what the U.S. has done for him.
“I was lost when I came to this country, full of fear,” he told HuffPost. “But if I have to go tomorrow, I guess I have to.”
“I didn’t understand the world. I had no reason to have a life. That’s what I used to think. And now I see the beauty. Now I see so much blessing that this country has. Unfortunately, the poison on the hearts or in the souls full of hate or division, it kind of gets me sad. But at the same time, without that, I would not distinguish the difference between that and compassion and love. So I guess we need both,” he reasoned.
As for what’s next for Ruperto after such a tumultuous chapter? He plans to continue giving back to his community and family.
“What I want to do is just keep trying to grow, keep trying to do the right thing, keep trying to be better every day,” Ruperto said.
Ruperto’s release offers a glimmer of hope for the thousands of other immigrant detainees, many of whom are also in the U.S. legally, and confirms the importance of community organizing.
“I think we are in a period in the United States where we are seeing authoritarian creep,” Kennedy said. “We see through this case that when there are infringements on our rights and when there are moves in society to be more repressive, it is up to us, to citizens and to people, to push back against it, and that does protect our democracy.”